The revolution is coming

MEP, County Councillor and MP together in Thame – but none of us gets to decide

I can exclusively reveal the result of Thursday's county council elections. They will be won by the Stay-at-Home Party, which will secure more support than all the others combined. Indeed, I shouldn't be at all surprised if more than two thirds of the people who have taken the trouble to register to vote decline to cast their ballots on 2 May.

Politicians, at this stage in the electoral cycle, like to talk up their prospects, but I've never seen much purpose in contrived optimism. I've spent six weeks canvassing all over my South East constituency. I've knocked on doors in seven counties. I've spoken at rallies for party activists and at open meetings. I've stuffed leaflets through a thousand letterboxes. I've given rolls of "Vote Conservative" stickers to children as they gush forth from school. I've flirted politely with their mothers at the gates.

What is The Voice Of The People saying? Ask canvassers from any party and, if they're honest, they'll tell you the same thing. The Voice Of The People is saying, 'Meh.' Pressed further, The Voice Of The People will elaborate thus: 'It makes no difference how I vote: nothing's going to change'.

And, of course, it has a point. Decisions that ought to be made in local councils are too often made by remote bureaucracies. Powers that, in the rest of the Anglosphere and in Europe, are devolved – education, taxation, welfare – have been centralised in the United Kingdom. Three quarters of local government finance comes from the Treasury – the highest proportion of any EU state except Malta.

One of the reasons I was an early enthusiast for the Coalition – though my feelings have since cooled – was that I hoped that it might disperse, diffuse and democratise power. And d'you know something? It has. Or at least, it has started.

I spent part of the weekend in the pretty Oxfordshire market town of Thame, represented previously by Boris Johnson, now by a local champion called John Howell. John was there, as were local councillors and the brilliant leader of Oxfordshire County Council, Ian Hudspeth. But – this is the best bit – none of us really mattered. Because, on Thursday, the people of Thame will decide, in a local referendum, where to build their new houses. The politicians have been cut out. Here, along with elected sheriffs, is a foretaste of the direct democracy that Britain might one day enjoy.

We've still got a very long way to go, of course. But give credit where it's due. Governments hate giving away any jurisdiction. Yet, on an issue that matters enormously to people across my Home Counties region, power is passing from a remote bureaucracy to a local community. If we can have local referendums on planning, we can have them on policing priorities, tax levels, road schemes. This could be the beginning of, literally, a revolution: a turning of the wheel, a setting upright of that which has been turned on its head, so that the state once again becomes the servant of the citizen rather than the other way around.